Every winter when I come home there’s a new jigsaw puzzle waiting for me ☺
Me and my dad are big fans of jigsaw puzzles- there’s just something so relaxing about putting those pieces together!

John Spilsbury created the first jigsaw puzzle in 1760s. Spilsbury was a British cartographer who commercialised the jigsaw puzzles by cutting wooden maps into pieces and selling them as a tool for learning the geography for the kids of the aristocracy.

John Spilsbury’s puzzle

John Spilsbury’s puzzle

John Spilsbury’s puzzle

The puzzles that Spilsbury made were actually called dissection puzzles and similar objects were already present in Ancient Greece. Dissection puzzles referred to some geometrical form that can be made from smaller geometrical pieces (e.g. The Ostomachion is a game based on a dissection puzzle. The game consists of 14 pieces that make up a square and the players have to reshape these pieces to as many different forms as possible. Some sources say that the ostomachion was created by Archimedes).
The kind of jigsaw puzzles that we are more used to started to be produced in 19th century when the tools to cut intricate curves for each piece became available (that’s were the name jigsaw actually comes from).
Ostomachion